#1800s

William Carpenter’s 1885 Baltimore pamphlet *One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is Not a Globe* packages zetetic anti-globe arguments adherents still cite. LOC/Internet Archive/Gutenberg preserve the text; Proctor-era reception refused it as cosmology. Contested/L2 documents the pamphlet and reception without baptizing Flat Earth as true.

Samuel Rowbotham’s zetetic program (1849 pamphlet; 1865 Earth Not a Globe) runs through Lady Blount’s Universal Zetetic Society, Samuel Shenton’s IFERS (1956), Charles K. Johnson’s California society, Daniel Shenton’s 2004/2009 web relaunch, and the post-2014 YouTube boom of Dubay, Sargent, and FEIC.

On the Old Bedford River in the Cambridgeshire Fens, Samuel Rowbotham (1838) reported a boat flag remaining visible over roughly six miles from a low telescope; John Hampden’s 1870 wager, Wallace’s theodolite redesign, Oldham’s 1901 photographs, and modern laser restages keep the canal at the center of flat-Earth experimental citation.

Wilbur Glenn Voliva, General Overseer of Zion, Illinois’s Christian Catholic community, preached a flat Earth in *Leaves of Healing*, directed church schools against globular astronomy, and broadcast on station WCBD beginning in 1923. Commerce Department and Federal Radio Commission monitoring treated WCBD as a sectarian specialty station. Digitized Zion serials and radio-history research doors document that institutional reception under contested clearance; the page refuses science-dismiss baptism.

In March 1882, a 30-foot flying serpent allegedly attacked a Southern Pacific train between Yuma and Los Angeles, witnessed by multiple passengers and crew.

In January 1882, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page report detailing a 30-foot-long, winged "flying serpent" that collided with a steam locomotive in the California desert, became enraged, and violently attacked the train while passengers shot at it with revolvers.